"Fats"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 305, 27 April 1945, Page 12

"Fats"

ONCE heard, never forgotten, is the bullfrog voice of "Fats" Waller, a short session of whose remarkable music Was heard recently from 4ZD. If you have ever seen him on the screen or in the pages of a magazine, you will not fail to recall his colossal figure, a Negro Chesterton, from the dark and cheerful features of which issue‘the unique performances which no other singer (a courtesy title) has ever dared to imitate. The voice of Fats Waller was raucous, husky, tuneless, abysmal; it made no effort to sing a melody or keep a rhythm; it just came out with the noise of a piece of sandpaper scraping along a plaster’ wall, and either you accepted @t and loved it, or it set your teeth on edge. "Fats" made up most of his own songs — clever piano-stuff which his enormous hands performed with carefess dexterity, often pretty-pretty melodic lines» which an ordinary singer would have reduced to sentimental mush, but which Waller’s alarming voice -turned to acid parody, often intentional, Certain of his performances no other singer should ever attempt to imitate; such things as the incredible ditty about the anatomy of the skeleton, a sort of First-Aider’s nightmare, in which we are told that "The foot-bone’s connecka to the legbone; the leg-bone’s connecka to the thigh-bone,"’ and so on through the entire range of rattling horrors. With Fats Waller’s recent death, his gargantuan mirth went too, something incredible and irreplaceable. °